I’m now officially an uncle! Hurrah! Congratulations to my sister and brother-in-law on the birth of their new baby boy.

The meeting with Alex went really well. He seemed reasonably impressed with what I’d done so far, considering it was my first effort, and gave me some excellent ideas on how to improve it.

It’ll mean a lot more work now, but as we were talking a new vision of what the film could be crept into my mind.

Strangely enough he said a lot of stuff that I’d thought, but as no one else had picked up on it, I figured they were just fanciful notions. He also suggested a couple of things that I’d tried and then lacked the confidence to stick with, so those bits are goping straight back in.

His main comments were:

The whole last sequence is unclear as to what is going on. More information is needed to get the link between the old book and Jess etc.

There were a few scenes where the acting is unbalanced, with stronger parts and weaker parts. He suggested finding the strong parts and then setting them as a benchmark and ensuring that I had scoured all my takes to ensure I was using the best I could get.

The footage I have of ‘Gertrude’ that we shot out on the Marsh all those moons ago is slightly wrong, as her body language suggests that she is giving something, rather than taking it.

There are a couple of scenes where I could start even later as well, which I’d missed.

The biggest and best suggestion he had was to perhaps introduce Gertrude in voice overs at a couple of places to explain more the origins of the book and why the ritual had to be done on a certain day etc. etc.

I’ve always thought voice overs are crap, but when you’ve not a lot of time to tell a complex story, I’ve realised they could just be very useful (the thought crossed my mind the other day while I was watching About a Boy).

He asked me a pertinent question which was; how many people do I want to get the film on the first viewing? It’s a great question, and one I’d not really considered. I’m still not sure what the answer is.

My initial reaction was, ‘only a few people’. Then I thought, ‘how pretentious and daft can I get? That flies in the face of the very reason I want to do any of this, to tell stories with some value to as large an audience as possible’. Fool.

So as we drove over to the hospital to see my sister this evening, I started formulating a new idea to introduce Gertrude and how she can better explain the book. Then I started thinking about taking it beyond voice overs and introduce her actually writing the book. Should be possible as Amber only filled up a certain number of pages…